When she's not chasing former Vice Presidents or leaping social networks in a single bound, Ellen McGirt occasionally shows up at her job as Senior Writer at Fast Company magazine. She covers a range of business topics, but never stops looking for the writer's holy grail: The business ideas - and people - who are changing the world.
McGirt joined Fast Company in February 2007 from Fortune, where she was a senior writer. She was also a columnist and editor-at-large for Money, where she covered a wide variety of health care, consumer, personal finance and investing topics. McGirt has served as a guest correspondent for CNN's American Morning, and has appeared frequently on Good Morning America, CBS Early Today, NBC Nightly News, CNBC, CNN, and American Public Media.
Before joining Global Grind Wright was senior vice president of technology at Digitas Health and was, responsible for leading the growing company's technology practice.
Previously, Navarrow was chief technology officer for BET.com, the number-one African American Internet portal, run by Black Entertainment Television. Under his direction, BET.com doubled its number of registered users and unique visitors, and won numerous best-in-genre awards from companies such as AOL and Yahoo!. Navarrow also served as vice president of technology for 360hiphop.com, a start-up created by entertainment mogul Russell Simmons.
Navarrow has over 13 years of experience in the design and development of Web applications, and is considered an authority in enterprise content management implementations. His expertise has earned him a coveted place on the advisory boards of many dominant Internet technology leaders, such as Akamai, Vignette, and InfoWorld magazine.
He has also worked as the director of technology for Raymond Karsan Associates, a leading provider of Web-based training solutions for Fortune 500 companies. Before joining Raymond Karsan, he was the senior software engineer in the electronic publishing department of Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, one of the largest medical book publishers in the country, where he was instrumental in the design and development of Internet-based publishing systems for online medical journals.
Tim brings a combination of operational, technical and international business experience to Norwest Venture Partners. Tim focuses on investments in wireless and digital media as well as business development initiatives in Asia-Pacific. Tim has recently invested in 3Jam, a multiparty mobile text messaging platform and service, and has joined the board of directors.
Prior to joining NVP in 2006, Tim was a principal at Gabriel Venture Partners where he was actively involved in over a dozen wireless-related deals and led Gabriel's investments in Iridigm Display Corporation (acquired by Qualcomm), Eyespot, Sequoia Communications, Sandbridge, and Kajeet. He also contributed to the boards of Placeware (acquired by Microsoft) and Arula Systems (acquired by Raritan), TestQuest, NextG Networks, and IPWireless. Tim built Gabriel's wireless sector practice and helped establish business development capabilities through strong, strategic relationships across the wireless value chain, particularly in Asia-Pacific.
Jeffrey Papen is founder and principal of Peak Web Consulting in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, a network outsource company that runs the networks for many leading Web 2.0 companies today. Peak Web Consulting architects national network backbones and manages connectivity between datacenters around the world. Jeffrey and his team have helped MySpace scale its network infrastructure through its incredible growth since its startup, also providing operational advice and vendor recommendations to the MySpace technical team.
Jeffrey also ran the Yahoo! backbone and Excite@Home networks for more than 5 years. A graduate of UCLA and frequent industry lecturer, he has developed networking tools to enhance his client implementations and holds the highest certifications from Juniper Networks.
Sergio brings to NVP over 12 years of operational experience in marketing, product management, business development, sales and finance from a wide range of business and consumer technology companies. Sergio is focused on investments in the consumer internet, media and software sectors. His current investments and board seats include Adzilla and Fatdoor.
Prior to NVP, Sergio was the first business executive and Vice President of Marketing at Photobucket, Inc., which was successfully sold to News Corp in May for a reported $300 Million. At Photobucket, Sergio drove viral marketing, public awareness and user experience, which helped accelerate Photobucket's growth to more than 40 million unique visitors per month in just a few years from inception. Photobucket is now one of the top 40 most visited sites on the internet and the leading photo and video hosting and sharing service on the internet.
Prior to Photobucket, Sergio was Director of New Ventures at eBay, Inc. where he pioneered and led eBay's digital goods marketplace and its user generated content efforts worldwide. Prior to that, Sergio was General Manager of the consumer electronics marketplace at eBay, which he grew from $150 million to over $500 million in gross merchandise sales in less than three years. Prior to eBay, Sergio was the co-founder and led sales and marketing at Cymerc from inception to more than $15 million in revenue. Sergio has also worked in a variety of roles at various business software and services companies such as Siebel Systems, Portal Software and Morgan Stanley. Sergio is an officer of the Harvard Business School Tech Club, which he helped start and grow to one of the largest alumni networking organizations in the country.
Sergio holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.
